a stupid little girl. He spoke slowly, and when she tried to interrupt him, he simply carried on talking. And the sex—what sex. At first—and she cringed to think of it now—she’d rather liked his professorial, grown-up way of treating her, had found it rather a turn-on that he was so formal, reserved, buttoned up. Now, when she thought of how she’d tried to get him to want her more, tried to excite him, it made her want to disappear, as fast as possible, into the ground. And she’d begun to think that was normal, that it would always be like that…She looked down at herself with disgust. He just hadn’t fancied her, that was all, and why would he? He was hanging on in there till something better came along, something Ticky-shaped, with honey-coloured limbs and hair and friends in common and…Ugh.
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ came Adam’s voice in the darkness, startling her. Tess laughed, hollowly. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘What’s on your mind?’
‘You don’t want to know,’ Tess said bleakly.
‘Come on,’ said Adam. ‘It’s me, T. I’ve just spent the evening pretending to be your boyfriend.’ He said, in a thick Russian accent, ‘We have no secrets, Misha.’
Oh, I was just thinking about the last time I had sex with Will, and he stopped halfway through and said, ‘Can we just stop this? Let’s just go to sleep, shall we?’ and then picked up the FT while I lay there, naked, next to him…
‘Seriously,’ Tess said, kicking a dandelion out of the way as they turned into Lord’s Lane. ‘You really don’t want to know. And I don’t want to tell you.’
‘Is this the Dealbreaker that you won’t tell me about? You are turning into a bit of a librarian, I have to say,’ said Adam smugly.
Tess stared at him with loathing, all former understanding and maturity between them gone. ‘What?’ she practically cried.
‘Well, T. All that chat to Will about the course you’re teaching. And all that stuff about Ancient Rome. I mean, no one likes all that better than me, but when you started going on about how the hole in the roof of the Pantheon was twenty-seven feet in diameter—well. Even I was a bit bored. I thought Ticky was going to fall asleep.’
Tess took her hands out of her cardigan pockets. ‘What the hell, Adam?’ she yelled. ‘Not this again. Don’t you find that interesting?’ Adam shook his head, smiling at her. ‘Well, you should,’ Tess told him tartly. ‘The Pantheon, it’s the greatest building ever! They still don’t know how it was built! And—boring Ticky, it’s hardly a difficult subject, is it? She’s about as interesting as a—a slice of brown bread!’ She pointed over her shoulder, as if Ticky were there. ‘Before it’s even become bread!’ She cast around her. ‘Like—when it’s flour! No, when it’s wheat! She’s like a field of wheat! Even more boring than that, like a—a—!’ She ran out of steam and stared at him. ‘I can’t believe you said that.’
Adam opened the door; she wondered, in the back of her mind, why he now owned a set of keys. ‘Tessa. I’m not having a go at the person who built the Pantheon, OK? I’m just saying, there’s a time and a place,’ he said, smoothly, waving tacitly to Francesca, who was sprawled on the sofa clutching a box of toffees, her long brown hair glowing against the electric blue of the Chinese silk dressing gown. She raised her eyebrows, waved at them with one hand, and popped another toffee in her mouth with the other. Adam took off his coat. ‘And the time and the place were not necessarily then.’
‘Sup?’ Francesca mumbled indistinctly. ‘Howas the jink?’
‘Awful,’ said Tess, bitterly. ‘He’s an idiot, she’s an idiot, I can’t see any reason why I was with him all that time, and, by the way, according to Adam not only am I really boring, but I’m turning into a sodding librarian.’ She kicked off her shoes.
Francesca raised her eyebrows again, as Adam moved over to the sofa and took her hand; he flicked each of her fingers, gently, looking down at her, and kissed her gently on the lips.
‘Librarians are great, my mum’s a librarian,’ Francesca said. ‘It’s not that. I think it’s more that you’re turning into an old lady.’ She nodded, as if she was glad she’d found the point of what Adam was getting at. ‘Mmm.’
‘Yes,’ said Adam. ‘That’s it.’
Francesca slid a toffee into his mouth, her thumb catching his bottom lip. Adam’s eyes glazed over.
Tess, still standing by the door in her bare feet, felt as if she might have been a novelty act they were keeping in a cage, like a female Elephant Man. Elephant Lady. Who has some interesting information about Roman temples. She sighed, wobbily, feeling the beer swilling around inside her. ‘I’m going to bed,’ she said, her voice aching, and it sounded as though she was merely grumpy. ‘Night.’
‘Night,’ Francesca called.
‘By the way, thanks again, Adam,’ Tess yelled as she stomped up the stairs.
‘Any time, T,’ Adam said. ‘Night, pet.’
There was silence from the sofa, as the TV talked to itself, and Tess closed the door to her room and leaned against it, staring blankly at the white wall opposite. What was happening to her? She felt as though was playing her own version of Snakes and Ladders, or some other board game. Someone who’d taken one step forwards, two steps back. From downstairs, she heard soft laughter and a low moan. Tess buried her head in the pillow, and finally let herself cry.
The trip to Italy was the central plank of the Langford College Classical Civilization course. Around half the class were going; it justified the high fees and it emphasized that which could not be said out loud—that this was a course without qualifications, with a nice holiday at the end of it. Of course, it would be nice, no, desirable, to come out of it with a working knowledge of Rome and her Empire, and the miracle that was fifth-century BC Athens, but if you were aiming to be the next Erich Segal or Sir Kenneth Dover, you wouldn’t come to Langford College.
It seemed to be coming around incredibly quickly. One moment it felt as if Tess had been back for just hours; after Will’s visit she realized it was nearly four months since she’d returned to Langford. The feeling of shiny newness she’d had was starting to leave. She was in a routine.
But Langford was so beautiful, this time of year. How could she have lived in the city for so long, knowing what spring was like in the countryside? Sometimes, Tess felt almost drunk on its beauty. The frothing cow-parsley in the hedgerows, the birds that sang outside her window in the morning, the bright green of the lanes, cowslips and primroses and everything in bloom, the riotous signs of life bursting forth everywhere. In the town, people opened their windows and let down the striped awnings of their shopfronts; pots filled with geraniums appeared outside the pub, and the tables and chairs. Dark green bunches of asparagus were everywhere in the shops; cool, sweet winds blew through the backstreets, into dark rooms dusty from the winter. The town was coming alive again; she felt it, Tess felt it more than anyone.
‘Are you doing something different with your hair, dear?’ Jan Allingham asked Tess, a week afterwards, as she was wiping down the whiteboard. The class had broken up and her students were dispersing slowly, grey and ash-blonde heads grouped together, clutching their textbooks and notepads, talking earnestly, nodding to one another.
Tess
